A Case of Discovery

was—so noble, so genuine and withal, so loveable, Christendom would admire, honour and love him as all Muslims do. In the Prophet Muhammad, may peace be upon him, there is nothing vague and shadowy, mythical or mysterious, as, for instance, in Zoroaster and Sreekrishna, or even in Buddha and Christ. The very existence of those Prophets has been seriously doubted and even totally denied; but nobody, as far as I am aware, has ever ventured to reduce the Prophet Muhammad, may peace be upon him, either into a “Solar Myth” or into a “fairy tale” as some eminent savants of Europe have done with Buddha and Christ. Oh! What a relief to find, after all, a truly historical Prophet to believe in! As for the Quran, it is not a mere heterogeneous compilation of a wilderness of stories and chronicles, of Prophetic rhapsodies and of poetical biographies, produced at widely different periods and by widely divergent men, and thrown into one single mould nobody exactly knows when and how; but it is, on the contrary, one single Book bearing the indelible impress of one great Soul to whom God in His mercy has chosen to reveal it. There is such a marvelous continuity and uniformity running throughout the whole Book, that no impartial critic or fair-minded reader can ever doubt either its sincerity or authenticity. You may call it tedious or monotonous, if you like, you may even point out some of its apparent discrepancies, but you cannot deny its being exactly the same book as that which was revealed to the Holy Prophet during his life-time at different periods and on different occasions ever since that memorable night of the 27th Ramadan (Lailatul Qadr) when the angel Gabriel stood before him and said: Read, in the name of your Lord, who created, created man from clots of congealed blood. Read! Your Lord is the Most Bountiful One, Who taught man by the